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April 19, 2008
The Innovator's Real Dilemma
Jessica Stillman at the new BNET1 blog rounds up research from Accenture, the Conference Board, and Wharton to talk about why Fostering Innovation Stumps Executives ...
This is an interesting situation to ponder: making choices about how much to invest in innovation , versus in knowledge management and, separately, business intelligence as other paths to insight. Overall, what the organization is mainly after -- where the real money rests -- is the insight, whatever the path. But the current thinking about management priorities indicates that insight is pretty hard to come by, so lesser-beaten paths to it are also getting a lot of attention.
One challenge that surfaces, somewhat amusingly, is the presumed need to be innovative about how to foster innovation. For example, given that "innovation" is so easily approached as "creativity", it is not surprising that at places where real urgency comes from competition against either industry rivals or the budget, the idea of stimulating the worker's right brain with art experiences can gain some real traction.
But perhaps everything new is old again... The simplest way to assure that innovation is "fostered" is to provide
(1.) a clear statement of why the company will consider something to be "innovative" and...
(2.) a clear statement about what circumstances will cause the innovation to be rewarded in a way that directly benefits the individual(s) involved.
Generally, if company leadership can't get that much communication together and abide by it, then most other "fostering" efforts are essentially arbitrary.
Furthermore, this effort should not be confused at all with management's concern about how to measure the innovation's impact on the company's performance. The performance impact issue is not something that should be making innovation special. Any management team that rewards "performance impacts" with bonuses should simply add innovations to the mix of things that can be clearly accounted for as contributors to better performance. Meanwhile, innovation is about doing things differently to create opportunity; but execution is about doing things a certain way to hit performance targets.
This is where managers have to get real: if they will not reward innovators for being innovative, as opposed to making the reward conditional upon performance increases, then people will learn that innovation is not worth the effort at this organization. So in step (2.) above, the "circumstances" to be declared must start with something other than performance metrics.
Posted by Malcolm Ryder at April 19, 2008 8:42 AM